The FlashStack CI becomes the latest in a crowded field of converged infrastructure solutions offered in partnership with Cisco UCS and Nexus technology, although one Pure Storage partner says there's plenty of room for all.

DataGravity, whose founders are storage veterans who also founded EqualLogic and then sold it to Dell, plan to use the new funding to develop its sales and support teams to expand the reach of its DataGravity Discovery Series into the channel.

Flash-based storage devices launched in 2014 offered not only performance, but such features as utility pricing and advanced storage to meet a wide range of business needs from the SMB to the enterprise.

The server industry in 2014 proved that, despite all the talk about software-defined whatever, hardware is still an integral part of the IT market as shown in these 10 very interesting new server offerings.

NetApp has joined the EVO: RAIL bandwagon with a partnership that combines VMware's EVO: RAIL software stack with NetApp's storage, server and software technology into a new hyper-converged infrastructure offering.

EMC, which traditionally acquired companies with top market share, now prefers to acquire startups not only for their lower price but for the extra time EMC gets to make their pending product launches better integrated into EMC's strategy.

The EMC Federation, including EMC Information Infrastructure, VMware, Pivotal and RSA, together can build complete customer solutions, but overlapping technologies can lead to some friction between the different components.